One Week Left

Last Monday we took a day trip to Wittenberg, the town where Martin Luther lived. It was kind of cold and foggy, but the town was pretty, and I had a good bratwurst, so it was all right. We also saw the two churches in the town, one of which was the one where Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door, starting the Reformation.

We've also finished reading Faust and then yesterday saw it performed in the Deutsches Theater. The book was hard, and really above the level of someone who had just completed 103, but the other 103ers and I got through it. It's still a really good piece, and really pretty writing.

Also yesterday five of us saw another Hertha BSC soccer game, this time against Hannover 96. When I left my host's apartment, it was partly cloudy, and looked like it would be a nice day for a game, but by the time we got to the Ubahn station Olympia Stadion, it had entirely clouded up, and then snowed for the first time in Berlin. Strange, pellety snow. There was also one booming thunderclap, in the middle of a snowstorm, the first time I had ever heard that. The whole game it snowed on and off, which was really beautiful, and made for an interesting game. It was a better soccer game this time. Evenly matched, but still no score until the 86th minute, when Hertha scored and then held on to win 1:0. Of course, more rowdies in the stadium again, who went nuts when Hertha scored, and on the packed SBahn back home, too. The whole Sbahn ride back, the Hertha fans sang drunken chants and beat on the walls and doors of the Sbahn. It was really entertaining.

I also saw the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, a museum dedicated to 2000 years of Jewish history. It's a really cool museum in a really cool building. Given the clearly hampered Jewish-German relationship over the years, there were a lot of interesting things over the historical relationship of Germans and Jews, especially the parts on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, they had readings from original documents on debates from the 19th century like "should Jews be full citizens" or "can a Jew be a German", in which even the "yes" debaters were awful. the part from WWI on was really well done, with a wall documenting the lost rights of Jews over two years spans after 1933, and emigration attempts, and pictures of Allied soldiers making horrified German citizens walk through the concentration camps directly after the Allied forces had found the camps, and then films over the Auschwitz trials later. It was a really cool museum.

In exactly one week at this time I'll be on my flight over the Atlantic, coming back home. My flight leaves at 6:00 AM local time, which may have been a mistake, but might be kind of fun, too. I probably won't have trouble sleeping on the plane.